


It can be hard to tell the difference between a stray dog and a wolf pup

by naye



Category: Gintama
Genre: Beginnings, Friendship, Gen, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-16 19:22:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13642845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/naye/pseuds/naye
Summary: The day she found the boy, Otose hadn't planned on visiting Tatsugorou’s grave at all.





	It can be hard to tell the difference between a stray dog and a wolf pup

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Midnight_Run](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Midnight_Run/gifts).



The day she found the boy, Otose hadn't planned on visiting Tatsugorou’s grave at all. It was a weekday, and she had business to attend to. But that morning the leaden clouds that had darkened Edo’s skies for days finally burst open. Then the cold that she had been feeling in her joints turned the expected showers into snow. It fell in such quantities that you had to brush it off as you walked, or end up blanketed in the stuff. The deliveries she had been expecting were all cancelled, of course. The footing outside was so bad that both cars and carts were getting snarled up or ending up in storefronts and ditches. This left Otose with a few hours before any of her regulars would come by - and they would come, even in weather like this - with nobody to talk to and the snow piling up outside.

Otose thought about Tatsugorou in the cold, his name hidden by frost, and made her way down the street to the vendor who still sold the same manju her husband had always loved. It made old man Yoshida smile to see Otose, and she had to force him to accept her coin - his business would suffer more than hers, a day like today. 

The snow turned the streets as empty as the graveyard, the sounds of the city muffled by the heavy flakes. It really was foolish to come out here like this - her toes were freezing already, and her cigarette was getting damp. Otose would put it out before entering the graveyard anyway, but it still irked her. But the manju were still warm, and it would do her good to get them to Tatsugorou before they went as cold as everything else out here. Walking the familiar path between the gravestones it was as if the cold had drained all color from the world, leaving it a strange shadow of its usual self. She wondered idly what it looked like to her dear husband, watching over the tracks she left in the snow and the drifts piling up high against his tombstone.

Only one of them wasn’t a snowdrift at all. It was a boy - though for an instant at first she thought him an old, silver-haired man. Otose sent a silent question to her husband. _Darling, what’s this?_ Usually she was the one who brought Tatsugorou gifts, not the other way around. Though he always had loved finding her surprises she would enjoy. This one, though, she didn’t quite know what to make of. A ragged pup, he looked like. Not much good to anyone - but then again, Tatsugorou knew her type. Otose smiled, and placed her husband’s manju on his grave. Maybe it wasn’t just a random fluke that she ended up out here today, bringing warm food just as this stray huddled up in Tatsugorou’s shadow.

***

For such a beat-up, scrawny thing he was very earnest, her new pup. Full of moxie, though looked like he couldn’t hold his own in a fight with a street cat. And his eyes - oh, Otose knew the look in his eyes only too well. She knew it from the quiet ones who came to drink and from every time she was caught unawares by the reflection of her own face. Young as he was, Otose didn’t need Tatsugorou to tell her this was another soul that had somehow survived even when everything that once mattered was gone. She recognized it only too well, that feeling of being a ghost of your past self, living on through sheer grit and determination in this world of gravestones and memories.

If Tatsugorou had returned, he might well have looked as haunted. And if Tatsugorou had returned, he would have done as he always had, and kept going despite that. Because that’s who her husband had been - someone who protected everyone in his town, no matter who they were or what they had done in the past. The Tatsugorou that Otose had lost in the war would have taken in this fierce starveling, and offered him more than a cold gravestone and a handful of manju. So how could Otose refuse him?

It was slow going, getting him back home. He was weak enough to accept support without any of the pride so typical of his kind getting in the way. And even with a shoulder to lean on he still walked as stiffly as the old man she had first taken him for, shivering fitfully in the winter winds. They didn’t talk much, but at least she got a name.

By the time they made it back, the heavy skies were darkening to evening. Otose was supposed to be opening her doors and tending her bar. Well, she could tend to one extra customer tonight without too much effort. She left Gintoki in the cozy warmth of her own small rooms, heaping him in futon blankets and interrupting her evening to bring him bowls of rice porridge and warm sake and sweet red bean buns that he devoured with a particular ferocity.

When she closed up for the night, the boy had curled into a corner of the room, one arm around the wooden sword he’d had tucked into his belt, a futon blanket wrapped around his shoulders. Otose sighed. What a wild thing Tatsugorou had brought her - still so raw from the war that he treated sleep itself like an enemy.

***

The next day she showed him upstairs. It was quieter there, and there was more space. Big enough for a family, they’d thought when they first saw it. Now the rooms had been empty for long enough that there was a musty smell hanging about despite Otose airing the place out every now and again. She had kept the worst of the dust from settling in, but it still had an abandoned look about it. She’d thought about taking in lodgers, but it had never felt right to part from this space that had been meant to be theirs.

Her stray seemed confused, and made a few noises about having no intention to stay, but his shuttered eyes were hungrily taking it all in, as if seeing something that could fill the silent rooms. Otose made sure to tell him he would have to pay rent - it wouldn’t do to have him get too used to handouts - and Gintoki swore he would be the perfect tenant. Otose snorted at that - all he owned in the world was that practice sword and the grimy clothes on his back. But later she still asked around the neighborhood, and soon there were offers of futons and furniture and any amount of knick-knacks people were parting with when Otose was the one asking. She would have to send Gintoki out to fetch what he wanted once he was strong enough to go outside without falling over in the first cold gust to hit him.

***

That night she had him down in the bar again. To keep an eye on him, though Otose didn’t admit as much, and Gintoki pretended that he was only reluctantly putting up with human company and bowls of warm rice and savory pickles. The kid didn’t say much to anyone, but he darted out from his seat at the bar to grab empty glasses and bottles and bring them back. Otose would have showed him the sink next, but before she could the door was wrenched open and a raucous gaggle of young men spilled in from the cold.

Otose didn’t recognize any of them - they were not from around her part of town, though she knew their type. Whether they had been in the war or not, their families had chosen well enough to come out winners, and they thought the swords at their side meant the world was theirs to do with as they pleased. They already stank of spirits, all half a dozen of them, and they swaggered in snickering and pointing. It was a big joke to them, of course - they were slumming it. And maybe this tiny snack bar with its old woman proprietor seemed like the perfect place for a bit of bullying and free booze. 

Crossing her arms and glaring at them, Otose calculated which would make the biggest dent in her business - handing them some drinks to send them on their way, or letting them smash bottles around her while she told them what she thought of their manners, hygiene, and maturity level. She already knew which would be more satisfying, but was she really in the mood for that much cleanup?

Apparently, yes. Even an old woman had her pride, and Otose’s was that she would call out these nuisances for the losers they were and order them out of her bar. They took it about as well as Otose had expected, and she braced for their predictably violent refusal. 

The kid moved from his perch so quickly that Otose didn’t see him get up. One moment he was hunched over his third bowl of rice for the evening, the next he stood between the half a dozen screeching louts and the bar. It surprised the drunken trespassers into a moment of witless gaping before they burst into another chorus of jeers and laughter - Otose’s new stray wasn’t exactly the most impressive watchdog. With his scrawny body covered in the bandages Otose had wrapped for him and the bruises she’d left to heal on their own he looked like he’d likely lose a fight with a barstool.

Gintoki didn’t let that fact stop him. He just glanced at Otose once, and she - curious despite herself to see what her pup might be able to get up to - gave him a decisive nod. If he wanted to follow up on his unasked-for promise to Tatsugorou, now would be as good a time as any.

In her long life in Kabuki-cho, Otose had seen a lot of fights. Had seen a lot of excellent fighters give their very best, against each other and against crowds and sometimes against her own Tatsugorou, too. She was not sure she’d ever seen anything as brutally impressive as this half-starved boy with a wooden sword taking down six spoiled samurai carrying real steel blades. Not that most of them even got their weapons out of their scabbards before Gintoki dispatched of them. It was over so quickly the glass one of the regulars at the bar had started pouring for himself when Otose nodded still wasn’t overflowing when the boy slammed the snack bar’s door closed on the final limp body tossed out in the street.

Gintoki returned to his bowl of rice without saying a word. The regulars decided to pretend nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and went back to their drinks. Otose went into to her kitchen, and came out with a few red bean buns. She stopped by Gintoki’s seat, and left one for him with a quick smile. No praise - she wouldn’t want him to get it into his head that violence would meet with approval in this house - but his blank expression shifted into something warmer and more alive at that small gesture. 

Then she went through to Tatsugorou’s shrine in her rooms, and left him the rest of the red bean buns. Her dear husband had brought her a stray alright, but a stray wolf rather than the pup she had taken him for. Having her new tenant settle in Kabuki-cho was definitely going to make life more interesting in all sorts of ways, she could already tell. For the first time in years Otose found herself curious to see what would happen next here, in this rough and precious town that had been Tatsugorou’s to protect, and was hers, and would become Gintoki’s, too.


End file.
